Strong Engine, Works Good

By Joshua Brown

In January of 2022, Ben Ogden had a few days back in Vermont. It was his senior year at UVM, and Ogden had been in Europe, ski racing on the World Cup circuit. An engineering major, sometime construction worker, and old car enthusiast who grew up in Landgrove, Vt.—population 177 souls—he’s arguably the most promising American cross-country skier in a generation. Ogden was heading off to China in February to race in the Olympics. So what’s a guy like that going to do with some downtime back on campus? Head up to Sleepy

Hollow Ski Area in Huntington, take a ski—and then get under the hood of a PistenBully snow grooming machine. His friend, the proprietor, Eli Enman, was working to convert the machine from diesel to battery power. “It was in a million different pieces up in his garage and he had the battery pack all assembled. We're talking about thousands of volts, like, this is legit,” Ogden recalls. And he began to wonder how to make this DIY snow groomer work more efficiently. “It's a unique problem—an electric vehicle with a lithium-ion battery pack that’s only going to be operated when it's cold,” Ogden says. He became so fascinated that “I packed a bunch of these owner’s manuals from all the batteries, that Eli gave me, and I brought 'em to the Olympics,” Ogden says. “I was, like, researching batteries in Beijing”—in addition to leading the United States to a ninth-place finish in the team sprint.

UVM and World Cup skier Ben Ogden ’22 ahead of Norway’s Johannes Klaebo—for the moment—in a 15km race on the sixth leg of the Tour de Ski in Val di Fiemme, Italy. The day before, Ogden blasted ahead of Klaebo—perhaps the greatest skier of all time—in a sprint. In both races, Ogden didn’t beat the Norwegian, but the Vermonter’s gutsy tactics made waves in the world of professional cross-country skiing.

In January of 2023, Ben Ogden ’22—now a UVM graduate student in engineering—stood on the start line of a semi-final sprint in Val di Fiemme, Italy. This was the fifth stage of the World Cup’s grueling Tour De Ski, Nordic skiing’s answer to the Tour de France. (It ends with a ridiculously steep race at an alpine ski area—going uphill.) Between races, Ogden finds slices of time to study the thermal dynamics of electric vehicle batteries. Working, remotely, with Professor Yves Dubief, “I’m modeling how to have them wellinsulated in the cold, without bursting into flame,” he says. Which seems like very useful research, considering that Eli Enman’s homegrown, battery-powered PistenBully met a fiery end. “The controller blew up,” Enman says, ruefully, “and it burned to the ground.”

On this day, to Ogden’s right, was a Norwegian, Johannes Klaebo, perhaps the greatest skier of all time. Winner of five Olympic gold medals, he’s never lost a Tour De Ski sprint. Most World Cup skiers know the conservative thing to do is, um, not try to dust Klaebo. So what’s Ben Ogden—a UVM skier in his final NCAA season, who’s been jetting back and forth between Europe and Vermont to ski for both the Catamounts and the U.S. Ski Team— going to do? “I just took off,” he says. Going into a frenetic overdrive soon after the start, Ogden quickly gapped the field. It was a stunning move that had coaches staring and commentators commenting. Ogden’s goal was to make it through to the finals—using a trick from his youth-skiing days of blasting away suddenly, against faster opponents, in hopes of beating them with surprise. “He was brave,” says Patrick Weaver, the head coach of the UVM Nordic Ski Team, who was watching Ogden on television from Vermont. “I was hoping he was going to go for it—and he did. Ben has this amazing ability to go really fast and hard. He can't do it all day, but when he goes, he’s as quick as anybody in the world.” Finally, Klaebo realized that Ogden was getting away from him and put on the jets. The gamble had failed, Ogden’s engine had burst into flames, and he fell to fifth, one place out of the finals. “Still, that shook Klaebo’s world a little bit; he’s not used to going that hard in the semis,” says Weaver. For Ben Ogden, it was another chance to experiment and look for new ways to succeed. “I’m an entrepreneur of sorts,” he says, pointing to Eli Enman’s exploratory spirit—and the small company his mother and uncle founded, Vermont Maple Sriracha—as inspiration. “They’re not kicking back, waiting for someone else,” Ogden says. “It’s a Vermont thing: get out there and figure it out.”